drove off, and I checked into him when I had time. Name’s English—Lawrence Turnbull English, Junior. Occupation, financial consultant. Means he don’t do nothing. Family’s got twelve, fifteen million bucks. He consults with their trust officer on how to spend it. That’s as much as he works. Spends a lot of time taking the steam, playing racquetball, and protecting democracy from the coons and the queers and the commies and the lower classes, and the libbers and like that.”
The old cop shifted a little in the front seat and said, “He’s got an IQ around eight, maybe ten.”
“Benny’s right,” Foley said. “He snatched that broad, he’d forget where he hid her.”
“Where’s he live?” I said.
Foley took a notebook out of his shirt pocket, ripped out a page, and handed it to me. “Watch your ass with him though. Remember, he’s a friend of the chiefs,” Foley said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks.”
A plow rumbled by on Trapelo Road as I got out of the cruiser and went back to my car. The windows were opaque with snow, and I had to scrape them clean before I could drive. I went into the same Mobil station and got my tank filled and asked for directions to English’s house.
It was in a fancy part of Belmont. A rambling, gabled house that looked like one of those old nineteenth century resort hotels. Probably had a hunting preserve in the snow behind it. The plow had tossed up a small drift in front of the driveway, and I had to shove my car through it. The driveway was clear and circled up behind the house to a wide apron in front of a garage with four doors. To the right of the garage there was a back door. I disdained it. I went back around to the front door. A blow for the classless society. A young woman in a maid suit answered the bell. Black dress, little white apron, little hat—just like in the movies.
I said, “Is the master at home?”
She said, “Excuse me?”
I said, “Mr. English? Is he at home?”
“Who shall I say is calling, please?”
“Spenser,” I said, “representing Rachel Wallace. We met once, tell him, at the Belmont Library.”
The maid said, “Wait here, please,” and went off down the hall. She came back in about ninety seconds and said, “This way, please.”
We went down the hall and into a small pine-paneled room with a fire on the hearth and a lot of books on built- in shelves on either side of the fireplace. English was sitting in a red-and-gold wing chair near the fire, wearing an honest-to-God smoking jacket with black velvet lapels and smoking a meerschaum pipe. He had on black-rimmed glasses and a book by Harold Robbins was closed in his right hand, the forefinger keeping the place.
He stood up as I came in but did not put out his hand—probably didn’t want to lose his place. He said, “What do you want, Mr. Spenser?”
“As you may know, Rachel Wallace was kidnaped yesterday.”
“I heard that on the news,” he said. We still stood.
“I’m looking for her.”
“Yes?”
“Can you help?”
“How on earth could I help?” English said. “What have I to do with her?”
“You picketed her speech at the library. You called her a bulldyke. As I recall, you said you’d ‘never let her win’ or something quite close to that.”
“I deny saying any such thing,” English said. “I exercised my Constitutional right of free speech by picketing. I made no threats whatsoever. You assaulted me.”
So he hadn’t forgotten.
“We don’t have to be mad at each other, Mr. English. We can do this easy.”
“I wish to do nothing with you. It is preposterous that you’d think I knew anything about a crime.”
“On the other hand,” I said, “we can do it the other way. We can talk this all over with the Boston cops. There’s a sergeant named Belson there who’ll be able to choke back the terror he feels when you mention your friend, the chief. He’d feel duty bound to drag your tail over to Berkeley Street and ask you about the reports that you’d threatened Rachel Wallace before witnesses. If you annoyed him, he might even feel it necessary to hold you overnight in the tank with the winos and fags and riffraff.”
“My attorney—” English said.
“Oh yeah,” I said, “Belson just panics when an attorney shows up. Sometimes he gets so nervous, he forgets where he put the client. And the attorney has to chase all over the metropolitan area with his writ, looking into assorted pens and tanks and getting puke on his Chesterfield overcoat to see if he can find his client.”
English opened his mouth and closed it and didn’t say anything.
I went and sat in his red-and-gold wing chair. “How’d you know Rachel Wallace was going to be at the library?” I said.
“It was advertised in the local paper,” he said.
“Who organized the protest?”
“Well, the committee had a meeting.”
“What committee?”
“The vigilance committee.”
